Category: What Narcissistic Abuse Feels Like

I thought I had things under control. I saw the red flags of narcissism, but I didn’t interpret them as red or as flags. I was so innocent. There was the incident where he told me to stop going out with other guys before we’d even met in person. I’d mostly found it amusing. Surely, he couldn’t have been serious. It was like a joke. Like, why should he even care if a woman he barely knows and hasn’t even met yet is having a date? No one is jealous like that in real life. Right? [Read: Why Cognitive Dissonance...

Idealization and devaluation. I understand everything now. They are two sides of the same coin, neither truth nor lie. They are only the distorted reflections of your sickness. It feels like a grenade just went off. The shrapnel falls, scattering. All the clues flood into the right cracks all at once, but too quickly for me to absorb each in isolation. I begged you for answers so many times. But how could I have expected you to give them to me when you did not understand any point of view other than your own? You could not find the disconnect...

Earlier this year, I had a ribcage injury involving a couple of my ribs. Thankfully, it wasn’t as serious as I thought it was going to be at first, but breathing and sleeping were pretty painful and difficult for the first couple of weeks especially and it took about six weeks for me to feel completely back to normal again. The injury was accidental and occurred because of my own stupidity. “Did anyone give you this injury? Push you? Hit you?” They kept asking at the hospital, and I knew what they really wanted to know. I thought of everything...

“Why are you so beautiful?” I never knew quite what to do with it when he said that to me. How do you answer a question like that? It wasn’t something he asked me a couple of times.  It was one of his favorite compliments.  I mean, I guess it was a compliment. I remember the first few times he asked, I would laugh and shake my head in amusement. It was a silly thing to say, really. A silly thing to ask. I always had the impression though that he was waiting for me to say something in response....

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.” -Sean Spicer, Press briefing, January 21, 2017 I was lounging around on my couch in the living room that Saturday night, exhausted after a long, strange weekend in the District, where the one-two punch of Donald Trump’s chaotic inauguration followed by the record-breaking Women’s March had brought the city to a point of fatigue and uncertainty.  The news was on and I, like a lot of the rest of the country at that time, could not stop watching it. It...

“…Conscience…is an intervening sense of obligation based on our emotional attachments–including most especially love, compassion, and tenderness… Fortified with potent emotions, conscience is the glue that holds us together…”                                                                        -Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door   I sit here reading this book The Sociopath Next Door for research into people who lack empathy, remembering vividly when the book was released. I was in graduate school and I...

Letter from November 2015 (some identifying details removed) Dear ___________: I don’t feel anything anymore. That’s not really true. I feel an aching sadness that I don’t feel anything anymore. I used to feel hope that you would change the way you treat me, and I used to feel hope because there was something to hold onto. Now I know that if you change, it isn’t going to be right now, and I also know that there isn’t any time in our past for me to look back on and believe we can get back to and be happy, because...